Exploring Large Language Models and Hierarchical Frameworks for Classification of Large Unstructured Legal Documents

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Prasad, Nishchal, Boughanem, Mohand, Dkaki, Taoufiq
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914709569011712
author Prasad, Nishchal
Boughanem, Mohand
Dkaki, Taoufiq
author_facet Prasad, Nishchal
Boughanem, Mohand
Dkaki, Taoufiq
contents Legal judgment prediction suffers from the problem of long case documents exceeding tens of thousands of words, in general, and having a non-uniform structure. Predicting judgments from such documents becomes a challenging task, more so on documents with no structural annotation. We explore the classification of these large legal documents and their lack of structural information with a deep-learning-based hierarchical framework which we call MESc; "Multi-stage Encoder-based Supervised with-clustering"; for judgment prediction. Specifically, we divide a document into parts to extract their embeddings from the last four layers of a custom fine-tuned Large Language Model, and try to approximate their structure through unsupervised clustering. Which we use in another set of transformer encoder layers to learn the inter-chunk representations. We analyze the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) with multi-billion parameters (GPT-Neo, and GPT-J) with the hierarchical framework of MESc and compare them with their standalone performance on legal texts. We also study their intra-domain(legal) transfer learning capability and the impact of combining embeddings from their last layers in MESc. We test these methods and their effectiveness with extensive experiments and ablation studies on legal documents from India, the European Union, and the United States with the ILDC dataset and a subset of the LexGLUE dataset. Our approach achieves a minimum total performance gain of approximately 2 points over previous state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_06872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Large Language Models and Hierarchical Frameworks for Classification of Large Unstructured Legal Documents
Prasad, Nishchal
Boughanem, Mohand
Dkaki, Taoufiq
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Legal judgment prediction suffers from the problem of long case documents exceeding tens of thousands of words, in general, and having a non-uniform structure. Predicting judgments from such documents becomes a challenging task, more so on documents with no structural annotation. We explore the classification of these large legal documents and their lack of structural information with a deep-learning-based hierarchical framework which we call MESc; "Multi-stage Encoder-based Supervised with-clustering"; for judgment prediction. Specifically, we divide a document into parts to extract their embeddings from the last four layers of a custom fine-tuned Large Language Model, and try to approximate their structure through unsupervised clustering. Which we use in another set of transformer encoder layers to learn the inter-chunk representations. We analyze the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) with multi-billion parameters (GPT-Neo, and GPT-J) with the hierarchical framework of MESc and compare them with their standalone performance on legal texts. We also study their intra-domain(legal) transfer learning capability and the impact of combining embeddings from their last layers in MESc. We test these methods and their effectiveness with extensive experiments and ablation studies on legal documents from India, the European Union, and the United States with the ILDC dataset and a subset of the LexGLUE dataset. Our approach achieves a minimum total performance gain of approximately 2 points over previous state-of-the-art methods.
title Exploring Large Language Models and Hierarchical Frameworks for Classification of Large Unstructured Legal Documents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06872